


Wellspring's Daughter

by Patchworkearth



Category: Final Fantasy Tactics, Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen, The road to Hell is paved in good intentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 16:41:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12369810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Patchworkearth/pseuds/Patchworkearth
Summary: [Excerpted from an adaptation] They say she was a spy. This is one way it might have happened. One old man, one stray bird.





	Wellspring's Daughter

**768 OV / 6 ZA**

**Silversun Sagemoon**

 

In those days, before the sky burned, Bervenia was a drier place.

Nelveska Bay did not yet exist, that is, merely a far off lake which fed the Finnath, and so much of the land directly east of the Algost was of the Beddha; arid and dead land upon which people with more faith than sense did toil to little reward. The Nildahme called it The Serpent’s Mouth—because it swallowed you, and you died slowly.

But the Hume was a stubborn beast, and so settlements did exist. Parched little towns dotting the sandwaste from the Dueguera to the mires of Dorvauldar, sad places full of sad people. One of those towns was a little hamlet much too far from the lake named Glabados. They were weavers in Glabados, and good with clay, but they relied upon the trading parties that would pass from town to town, shuffling goods in a lifeline and spreading occasional word of the empire which had abandoned them.

It was one of those trading parties that sounded the alarm far and wide, and another which looked up in the sky in wonderment on that day, when a sleek little airship appeared overhead, reminding them for the first time in decades that they had not been forsaken by the royal family entire. A ship all in silver, it looked akin to a stretched-out canoe, or perhaps a hammock strung from the large dark balloon which kept it aloft. It was a pleasure craft, and looked it, though its passengers and their solemn expressions might convince one otherwise.

An eighty-nine year old man sat at the ship’s bow, clutching an ebony cane with the finest of filigree, watching as the first mate made a periodic check on the skystone. Though the ship relied as much upon the simple physics of air upon warmer air to fly, the skystone was necessary nonetheless. Its response to the Mist in the air was what enabled the ship to read the currents and move so gently and so quickly, and its properties of absorption allowed the ship to travel safely through Jagd. And all of the sandwaste was in Jagd. The old man regarded the stone with disdain. It reminded him of older days, and oftentimes he cared not to remember.

The ship banked easily, coming in on its approach, and the glare of the sun hit the old man’s eyes. The woman at his side, fifty years of age but in her beauty easily mistaken for thirty, handed him a pair of sunglasses.

The ship set down atop a low-slung dune but a few minutes walk from the town of Glabados, and on weak knees Al-Cid Margrace pulled himself up, keeping much of his weight upon the cane. The woman did not help him disembark, merely followed behind with the same neutral expression that she always carried. He moved slower than he once did, but once he was in motion he could acquit himself as well as he ever had. He could manage swagger just fine as long as he didn’t lead with his hips. Seconds after landing the gangplank was already dusted with sand at any rate, providing the extra traction he needed to march down, cane first, where a solider awaited with a salute and a queasy expression.

“My prince.” And prince he still was at his age, his eldest living brother quite at home on the throne as he’d never have been. The rest of them scattered amongst the Empire to do their parts as they always had. Except for his sister. Except for willful Ydorra Margrace, seventh of nine children and by far the most accomplished. A bitter irony, that. It was good that he knew this soldier’s face, because to be so close to her borders invited only trouble.

“You’ve a sad tale for me,” he said, and did not wait, began walking towards the town.

“It’s as we feared, my prince, an outbreak like none we’ve seen in a century or more.” The soldier was dressed in full regalia, but with a single cloth wrap around his nose and mouth. He looked more like a sky pirate than a Rozarrian regular, but he must no doubt be dying of the heat. Only the Dalmascans were smart enough to dress for this weather. “We’ve found no survivors.”

His brothers had never been to the sandwaste, had barely glanced at the names of these towns as they signed off on taxation documents unamended since the time of the Old Empire. He himself would rather be reclining on the balcony of the Ambervale, but it was his inability to refuse what was most difficult that had made him so of use to dear Mama, had it not?

The woman at his side unwound the cloth from the parcel she carried. The leather strap design was clearly Baknamy in origin, but the filter was constructed instead from sheaves of thin-cut wood in a series of lattice formations, tightly packed. The Viera had designed the mask an age ago, carefully culling the wood from dead trees, their Salve-Makers spreading various compounds between each layer before sealing the mask shut. Just the thing to keep out Morbolbreath. It had been a gift from Jote, or at least from her sister, in that respectful way Viera had of saying “leave us the Hell alone.” That it was Fran who delivered the gift carried many other layers of meaning; certainly for her, but also for him, in that a spymaster who received a ward against poison could only ever take it as a warning.

As she helped him strap the mask over his face, the soldier continued. “We have doused the fires, but investigation has moved slowly.”

He raised one eyebrow. “What was burning?”

“We’ve seen only accidents. Hearths left unchecked and the like.” The soldier’s voice tapered off, and then he looked not at Al-Cid, but at his assistant. “In truth, it’s as if all who fell did so near at once, where they were standing. We’ve yet to find so much as a body disturbed.”

His little bird tied cloth over her own face. He’d been discouraged from coming to Glabados. But if there had been one constant in the life of Al-Cid Margrace, youngest son, it was that he’d so rarely heeded such discouragement. A trait that had been useful to old Mama, for certain, but leaving him with little to be recommended by anyone else.

Other members of this unit were in the town proper as they entered, carefully collecting the corpses of the fallen. The whole town reeked of the dead, of course, but the heat was so dry that it didn’t linger as heavily as it should. When Al-Cid had been seventeen, he’d watched his eldest brother burn a village, and had done nothing. To be idle, then, was his fate ever after. There were signs of the fires here and there, but they were the sole impressions made upon the structures themselves by the plague’s outbreak. In time the bodies would be buried, and the town would remain, like a bleached skeleton in the sand.

He thought of decades ago, watching the Dynast-Queen, in white as she always was, sliding down a dune in pursuit of a fleeing wolf.

He passed by shops and homes without bothering to investigate. His spymaster’s instinct had not fled with age, or so he was assured. Each building was a story of value, a family lost, a business, a dream, but they were stories that would provide no answers. Though the town was small, the buildings were arranged in tight clusters together to form windbreaks against the possible sandstorms; thus accounting for the slow progress of the investigation. He turned down an alley between two houses, and then a second.

And there came upon a charnelhouse.

It was a small plaza, no bigger than a Bhujerban storefront, and in its center was the town’s well. There were benches to either side, for the gossip of maids who came to fetch the water, or the idle elderly in the shade of the surrounding buildings. A single fig tree rose in one corner to offer greater shade, clearly enriched by the only damp soil for miles around. And the entire plaza was covered in corpses. There were dozens, too many, and they were piled, as though they’d climbed over each other in their death throes. Knotted limbs intertwined, nails driven into each other’s flesh, mouths twisted into agony. And the relative humidity, the shade, only amplified this horror, for these corpses were rotting quickly, had drawn greater flies, had ripened and begun to emit stink as thick as Mist.

He turned his head. His aide did not blink, though her brows lowered. The soldier lurched forward to vomit into the sand.

“Why were so many gathered in one place?” she was asking him, but his eyes traveled down the length of his cane to where there was a spat of blood upon stone. He dragged the tip of the cane across it and saw it smear. Fresh. He looked around, and saw a second down another path.

They followed him, between two houses and around another corner, and nearly crashed into him when he halted before the largest building in the town of Glabados, made of well-stacked stone bricks more than half his height. It was a Pharist chapel, big enough for all the town to attend in congregation. The door yet lay open a crack, and the rood upon that door had come loose, dangling upside-down from one nail. He waved the soldier away; he’d need to get other hands to deal with the horrors of the well-square. The bodies of Glabados would all have to burn to prevent the plague’s spread. And each of them would require physicals, disinfections, magickal attendance. To rejoin society after this, it would in many ways be difficult to get clean.

He used his cane to ease the heavy door open without touching it and entered the chapel, his beautiful starling at his heels. Her right hand was at her leg in a way that he knew meant she wanted access to her dagger, but he paid it little mind.

The candles of the chapel had gone out, but light still came from the stained glass windows on three of four walls. There were bodies in some of the pews, but few. It seemed faith had left Glabados with the plague’s arrival. The abuna was nowhere to be seen; but at altar, a single figure was yet upright. A boy… no, a girl, six years old if she was a day, her brown skin ashy from thirst and her hands full-crimson with the blood of the fallen, was standing with her back to them, naked, on her feet but hands folded in prayer.

“Hello little bird,” he whispered, and the girl turned. Her eyes were dead, but she offered a single, chilling little giggle… before tipping over, the last of her strength past. He dipped forward, his cane clattering to the floor, and caught her as she fell, dropping himself to useless old knees. Out cold, flickering and faint, but still she lived. He cradled her head, brushed the wild hair from her face. No demon here, but a child.

“Ydorra’s men are soon to approach,” whispered his assistant, and he sighed, offered an elbow for her to help him to his feet, even as he carried the girl. Even at eighty-nine, she was no weight. Her skin was stretched tight over little bones, and she felt like no more than a straw doll. Working together, they were able to get his jacket off of his shoulders and around her body.

It had been many years since he’d taken a girl into his fold. And at his age, the old excuses, the old cover stories, would carry weight of more than eccentricity. But he’d played the fool for all his life in service of Rozarria. Let him do it all once more if need be, for this child foraken by God.

They’d lose the sandwaste and more to his sister in the days to follow, he knew, but maybe it would be this girl in his arms who’d take it back.

**Author's Note:**

> Excerpted from an adaptation project.


End file.
